Abstract:
Humanitarian intervention is a contested issue that has divided International Relations (IR) scholars and the broader public. Different schools of IR offer contending insights on humanitarian intervention: its motives, and factors behind it. Some schools endorse it, considering it an appropriate response to human rights violations, while others question its motivations. Realists and critical theorists are skeptical about the “humanitarian” rhetoric surrounding it, while liberals believe in its idealist aims. Guided by these questions, this study investigates the “No-Fly Zone” enforced in Northern Iraq in 1991 and the NATO Campaign in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 as two case studies of humanitarian intervention. It looks at these two cases through the lenses of realism, critical theory, and liberalism. The insights of each theory regarding these two cases of humanitarian intervention will be discussed and compared in order to discern which theory best explains each case. This study concludes that no single IR theory adequately explains all cases of humanitarian intervention. Some theories, however, do a better job explaining certain situations.
